Welcome back students and parents of Hadley Junior High! I am looking forward to a great school year as your 8th grade literacy teacher.

Teachers are being asked this year to communicate homework assignments and due dates through Google Classroom and Google Calendar. The calendar will allow students and parents to view all of the student’s core class assignments in one view. Google Classroom will allow students to access assignments and instructions from school or home using Google Drive. However, I will continue to maintain a teacher website with helpful links and use a place to review unit resources---including guidelines, rubrics and requirements and deadlines.

The 8th grade literacy team met over the summer, and worked on improving writing instruction using new resources developed by Lucy Calkins. We are also becoming knowledgeable on Kagan strategies that help build collaborative, organizational, listening, and speaking skills. Our overall instruction embraces 8th Grade Common Core literacy goals, and we will continue to work collaboratively throughout the school year. The following information offers a brief overview of learning within the literacy classroom:

Reading: Literature and Nonfiction Text: Student learning focuses on a reading workshop approach. To support student comprehension, students will use their expertise in visualizing, questioning, making inferences, understanding text structure, determining important ideas, and synthesizing information through fiction and non-fiction literature resources, guided reading, and independent reading.

Writing: Our writing program will be broken down into four different units---one for each academic quarter.

Quarter 1: Investigative Journalism: Students learn the process of writing narrative non-fiction pieces on important social issues. Quarter 2: The Literary Essay: Students analyze theme in fiction and non-fiction literature.Quarter 3: Position Papers: Writing a position paper on a complicated issue and including alternative arguments and points of view.Quarter 4: Reflection Papers: This unit allows students to explore literary topics and focuses writing on structure, cohesion, elaboration and language conventions.

Research and Study Skills: The research process is immersed in the first three writing units. Students improve questioning skills, writing a thesis statement, analyzing relevant evidence, and including a counter-claim free based on alternative points of views.

Language Conventions of Standard English:

​Parts of Speech: Students demonstrate understanding of the function of verbals, verb forms and recognize shifts in verb voice and mood. They will also maintain consistent verb tense. Students will edit for conventions, and will apply the conventions of English learned at previous grade levels to their own writing and speaking.Conventions: Students must be able to demonstrate conventions of capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.Vocabulary Acquisition: Eighth grade continues to build upon word meaning by analyzing word parts, multiple-meaning words or phrases, using context, figurative language and word relationships.

Speaking and Listening: Occasionally, students will speak in group activities and in oral presentations. The ideas should be organized in a logical order, and stay focused on the purpose. The speaking voice should be strong and paced. The purpose of the audience will be to focus on respectful listening.

Expectations Outside the Classroom

Literacy expectations for learning outside of the classroom are also important. The following information offers parents examples of assignments students will be working on throughout the school year.

Independent Reading: Students need to develop reading stamina, and are expected to develop and monitor goals, and read on a regular basis outside of the classroom. It is expected that students read a minimum of thirty minutes at least five days per week.

Writing: Students also need to develop stamina in writing, and should be writing every night. Writing assignments are often based on the writing unit, but may include responses, reflections, book reviews, or goal setting.

Vocabulary: To increase vocabulary word knowledge, students will need to study vocabulary words or word parts every night.

I look forward to an exciting 8th grade year! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by phone or email.